Does Philly's Stop-and-Frisk Policy Actually Fight Crime?

Elmer Smith at the Daily News gets to the heart of the matter:

"The city keeps records on the number of people who are stopped in what it calls pedestrian investigations. But nobody at the Police Department could tell me how many of those stops included pat-downs or how many, if any, gun or drug confiscations to credit to the practice."

There are a couple of reasons you might not keep records on how much crime a crime-fighting practice actually fights. One is that you don't want to know the results. The other is that you're too lazy to care. Which is why Mayor Nutter's defense of the program seems suspect:

"This is part of a larger crime-fighting strategy. We've put more officers on the street; we have taken away about 4,000 to 5,000 guns every year for the last three years. Homicides and [serious] crimes are down."

But, what, if anything, does stop-and-frisk have to do with that? If the practice is not being monitored, how can we be sure how fair or effective it has been?

Philly is now defending a lawsuit from the ACLU because the practice disparately targets minorities. The city might be in a better position to defend itself if it could demonstrate the practice mitigates crime -- that is, after all, the best defense available for constitutionally suspect practices. But City Hall can't make that demonstration; why should we believe it's worth the cost?

UPDATE: It's stop-and-frisk day! The Daily News editorial is here; the Inky editorial is here.

Jonah Goldberg and American Exceptionalism

There's something about Jonah Goldberg's column about lefties who bash American exceptionalism that seems to be missing the point, almost deliberately so. Goldberg seems to think that liberals who are reluctant to join the chest-pounding parade wish for America to become a little more European, a little more socialist:

The notion that America has its own way of doing things separate and distinct from Europe has been one of the greatest impediments to Europeanizing America's political and economic institutions.

Ultimately, it's not that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism so much as they believe it is holding America back, which might explain why they're lashing out at the people who want to keep it exceptional. But that too is nothing new. 'The Coolidge myth has been created by amazingly skillful propaganda,' editorialized the Nation in 1924 about the unfathomable popularity of Calvin Coolidge. 'The American people dearly love to be fooled.'

I don't buy this, at least not totally. Certainly, the two columns that Goldberg cites -- Michael Kinsley in Politico and Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast -- don't try to make that case. (Hell, the point of Beinart's column is that Keynesianism is now dead in the United States.) I think Kinsley gets closer to the root of my own problem with the idea of American exceptionalism with this paragraph:

The notion that America and Americans are special, among all the peoples of the earth, is sometimes called “American exceptionalism.” Because of our long history of democracy and freedom, or because we have a special mission to spread these values (or at least to remain a shining example of them), or because of our wealth, or because of our military strength, our nuclear arsenal, our wide-open spaces, our pragmatism, our idealism, or just because, the rules don’t apply to us. There are man-made rules like, “You can’t start a war without the permission of the United Nations Security Council.” We’ve gotten away with quite a bit of bending or breaking of that kind of rule. This may have given us the impression that we could ignore the other kind of rules —the ones that are imposed by reality and therefore are self-enforcing. These are rules such as, “You can’t have good ice cream without fat” or “You can’t borrow increasing amounts of money indefinitely and never pay it back, because people will eventually stop lending it to you.” No country is special enough to escape these rules.

Right. In keeping with Kinsley, my problem with the notion of American exceptionalism, as frequently practiced, isn't (despite Goldberg's allegation) that it holds America back -- but that it doesn't hold America back enough. Beinart's recent book, "The Icarus Syndrome," and Fred Kaplan's "Daydream Believers" both document how American leaders, particularly hawks, have tended to believe that America is so exceptional that the rules of warfighting don't apply to us. The results of that way of thinking, embodied in folks like Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, have been disastrous for the United States.

There are other ways that the embrace of American exceptionalism hurts our society, I think, but we can get into that later. The problem with Goldberg's column, of course, is that it responds to arguments that weren't made, all so that he can conclude by sniffing at "the sophisticates who chortle at the idea that there's anything especially good about America." It is -- like the attitude of American exceptionalism often is -- lazy, easy, and fails to address the real arguments and real problems that we face.

Barbara Bush's Miscarriage

Salon:

"In the weirdest news item of the day, the New York Post reveals that when George W. Bush was a teenager, his mother, Barbara, showed him her miscarried fetus in a jar. 'There's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life,' he tells Matt Lauer in an interview that will air tonight. This bizarre anecdote may make Barbara sound like a pro-life extremist who used scare tactics to sway her son's views of abortion, but what the Post doesn't mention is that the former first lady eventually became pro-choice."

You know, I think it's probably wrong to frame this in terms of the abortion politics when what this story is is really, really freakin' weird. A miscarriage, after all, isn't a choice -- but keeping the fetus afterward surely is. So much of the George W. Bush biography has been written as an Oedipal need to show up his accomplished father. But is it possible we're missing out on the real story here? What if Barbara Bush is really closer to being Angela Lansbury in "The Manchurian Candidate" -- and the key to understanding everything, in a really weird and dark and twisted way? Somewhere, an aspiring political novelist is writing an outline....

How Much Does Sarah Palin Know About Monetary Policy?

There's always a danger in underestimating one's political rivals. Successive generations of Democrats ridiculed the intelligence of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, only be defeated by them time and again. So I don't want to make the mistake of thinking Sarah Palin is dumb. Still, there's a real "the lady doth protest too much" quality to this Wall Street Journal op-ed:

"The former Alaskan Governor showed sound political and economic instincts by inveighing forcefully against the Federal Reserve's latest round of quantitative easing. According to the prepared text of remarks that she released to National Review online, Mrs. Palin also exhibited a more sophisticated knowledge of monetary policy than any major Republican this side of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan."

Wait. Really?

The Journal adds: "Misguided monetary policy can ruin an Administration as thoroughly as higher taxes and destructive regulation, and the new GOP majority in the House and especially the next GOP President need to be alert to the dangers. Mrs. Palin is way ahead of her potential Presidential competitors on this policy point, and she shows a talent for putting a technical subject in language that average Americans can understand."

To be fair, I'm not certain that deep knowledge of particular subjects matters in a potential president so much as their ability to get a good team around them, and to process and synthesize new information effectively. And it's possible that Palin has been deeply, deeply disserved by her "I read all the papers" reputation.

But the Journal is trying to sell Palin as one of the smartest Republicans around. It's a picture at odds with, well, just about everything on the public record about Palin. Somebody's lying.

Speaking of Jack Shafer and Bogus Trend Stories

Slate's Jack Shafer is letting his readers write the "bogus trend stories" this week: Interesting paragraph as he describes what makes a BTS:

"My partners in bogus trend-spotting have been Slate readers, who quickly picked up on how to identify them. Hardly a day goes by now that a reader doesn't e-mail me a bogus trend story discovery, often delineating the piece's essential bogosity in a couple of paragraphs in his correspondence. One marker of a bogus trend story is an abundance of such weasel words as some, few, often, seems, likely, and more, all of which allow a writer to simultaneously state a strong assertion and couch it. Another is an article with no data, just a string of anecdotes to support his thesis of a new or growing trend. The reliable marker of bogosity is a dodgy phrase like 'reliable numbers are hard to come by' in a news story."

Emphasis added. But with that emphasis added, let's return to Slate's story today about immigrant women faking domestic abuse to earn residency in the United States:

"But the law has a potential flaw, too: A small fraction of the time, it may also provide incentive for immigrant husbands and wives to fake domestic abuse."

And:

No one knows how widespread the fraud might be, though it's probably a small portion of all the spouses who apply for immigration relief saying they've been abused. In 2009, 8,534 people tried to gain permanent residency through VAWA's abuse provision, and 73 percent succeeded. Government databases don't track how many of the 2,000 or so denials were turned down on suspicions of fraud, as opposed to another reason such as lack of evidence.

Slate's fake domestic abuse story, in other words, has all the hallmarks of a BTS. I'm nominating it to Shafer. Will he run it?

Barack Obama Actually a Secret Muslim

This is flowing at Memeorandum.com, which means lots of people are talking about it:

"AS a schoolboy in Jakarta, Barack Obama attended Muslim prayer sessions with his classmates against the wishes of his mother.

The US President's former grade three teacher said that Mr Obama - who was known as 'Barry' when he attended the Menteng One school in Jakarta - studied the Koran and went to classes on Islam, despite the objections of Ann Dunham, a Catholic."

Wait for it...

Mr Obama moved to Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, when he was 6, and lived there for four years.

I have no idea if this stuff is true, but maybe tracking down what people were doing when they were 6 years old is a horrendous way to do our politics.

Slate's Bogus Trend Story About Fake Domestic Abuse

Slate's well-known for publishing articles that challenge conventional wisdom, sometimes embarrassingly so. I'm not sure if that spirit is behind today's piece that suggests immigrant women are faking spousal abuse in order to qualify for residency in the United States. The problem is that the story is rife with ambiguities that -- if it were published by any other outlet -- would earn it a place on Jack Shafer's "bogus trend" stories list.

How widespread is the fake-abuse problem?

"But the law has a potential flaw, too: A small fraction of the time, it may also provide incentive for immigrant husbands and wives to fake domestic abuse."

And:

No one knows how widespread the fraud might be, though it's probably a small portion of all the spouses who apply for immigration relief saying they've been abused. In 2009, 8,534 people tried to gain permanent residency through VAWA's abuse provision, and 73 percent succeeded. Government databases don't track how many of the 2,000 or so denials were turned down on suspicions of fraud, as opposed to another reason such as lack of evidence.

Nobody would defend false charges of domestic abuse. The problem here is that Frances McInnis uses a single source to provide the anecdotal foundation for her story, but fails to offer any evidence that the fraud is actually a problem and even admits that the government's current practices may be filtering out such fraud -- but then goes on to call for more measures against the fraud.

Still, some immigration and women's rights activists agree that measures should be in place to guard against immigrants looking to exploit the law's permissiveness. "Credibility must be established," says Leni Marin, a senior vice president at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, a nonprofit focused on ending domestic and sexual violence. "By no means do we endorse fraud," she said, adding that both the lawyer representing the case and immigration authorities should make sure that any claims of abuse are legitimate.

So we have a problem that's maybe not a real problem, requiring actions that might already be taken. This is weak, weak stuff. And to what end?